Seeking peace, Cambodians face Khmer Rouge nightmare again
AFP
Posted: 27 February 2006 1213 hrs
CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia : Phon Sam An stood with several hundred other Cambodian villagers amid the mass graves pitting the Choeung Ek killing fields, where the bones of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims were dug out of the ground more than three decades ago.
"I'm shocked by these graves ... after seeing this I can't even cry," said the 52-year-old widow, one of hundreds of rural villagers brought over the weekend to Khmer Rouge atrocity sites.
The grim tour was the first of several planned by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia ahead of a tribunal for former Khmer Rouge leaders that is expected to start late this year.
The Centre, which has been compiling evidence against the Khmer Rouge, brings rural Cambodians face to face - many for the first time - with the most notorious symbols of the genocide that devastated this small kingdom in the late 1970s.
The 300 villagers also visited the newly opened tribunal site outside the capital Phnom Penh, where UN administrators have been at work with their Cambodian counterparts since early February getting the long-stalled legal process under way.
"We want them to know this place so it's easier for them when the trial comes," Dara Vantan, deputy director of Documentation Centre of Cambodia, told AFP.
Centre officials worry that years of legal wrangling between the UN and the government - in which several former Khmer Rouge cadre hold posts - have alienated many regular Cambodians from the tribunal.
"This visit is to clearly tell them about the trial and to push them to participate in the process," Dara Vantan said.
As many as two million people died from starvation, overwork or execution during the 1975-79 rule of the Khmer Rouge, who erased all vestiges of modern life in their drive for an agrarian utopia.
Regime leader Pol Pot died in a remote jungle camp in 1998, while observers worry that other former regime leaders - including Pol Pot's number two Nuon Chea, foreign minister Ieng Sary and former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan - could die before the joint UN-Cambodian tribunal is convened.
So far only two former regime leaders are in jail awaiting trial: Ta Mok, a brutal military commander who ordered some of the regime's worst purges, and Duch, the slightly-built former math teacher who during the Khmer Rouge years ran the notorious Tuol Sleng torture centre.
Inside Tuol Sleng, a former school where 17,000 men, women and children were tortured before being taken to Choeung Ek and battered to death with farm implements, the villagers shuffled through corridors that still bear traces of the horrors that occurred there.
Tangles of rusting barbed wire bar the windows and many classrooms are lined with narrow, crudely built brick cells.
Only 14 Tuol Sleng inmates - a painter, a sculptor, an engineer and a handful of others the Khmer Rouge found useful - survived their incarceration.
One of these, 75-year-old Chhum Mey, pointed out the wire whips, clubs and knives used to torture prisoners, and explained how he was kept shackled with iron bars for most of his imprisonment.
"This reminds me of the bitterness I encountered under the regime," he said before breaking down into sobs.
Composing himself, he vowed to come before the tribunal to condemn his former tormentors.
"I will be one of the witnesses. I just want to ask them what led me to be put in Tuol Sleng," he said.
Cambodians appear divided over a Khmer Rouge tribunal, with some wondering what good it will do to put old men on the dock so many years after the genocide.
"I don't feel happy about seeing this because as a victim I don't know what justice can be had," said 40 year-old Nob Mei as he peered into the tribunal's future courtroom.
But Phon Sam An, whose husband and nine other family members were killed by the Khmer Rouge, said closure is needed for those who perished never knowing what alleged crimes had sent them to their deaths.
"This trial will help find justice for those victims who had done nothing wrong," she said.
"If there is no tribunal, they died in vain, like animals." - AFP/de
AFP
Posted: 27 February 2006 1213 hrs
CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia : Phon Sam An stood with several hundred other Cambodian villagers amid the mass graves pitting the Choeung Ek killing fields, where the bones of thousands of Khmer Rouge victims were dug out of the ground more than three decades ago.
"I'm shocked by these graves ... after seeing this I can't even cry," said the 52-year-old widow, one of hundreds of rural villagers brought over the weekend to Khmer Rouge atrocity sites.
The grim tour was the first of several planned by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia ahead of a tribunal for former Khmer Rouge leaders that is expected to start late this year.
The Centre, which has been compiling evidence against the Khmer Rouge, brings rural Cambodians face to face - many for the first time - with the most notorious symbols of the genocide that devastated this small kingdom in the late 1970s.
The 300 villagers also visited the newly opened tribunal site outside the capital Phnom Penh, where UN administrators have been at work with their Cambodian counterparts since early February getting the long-stalled legal process under way.
"We want them to know this place so it's easier for them when the trial comes," Dara Vantan, deputy director of Documentation Centre of Cambodia, told AFP.
Centre officials worry that years of legal wrangling between the UN and the government - in which several former Khmer Rouge cadre hold posts - have alienated many regular Cambodians from the tribunal.
"This visit is to clearly tell them about the trial and to push them to participate in the process," Dara Vantan said.
As many as two million people died from starvation, overwork or execution during the 1975-79 rule of the Khmer Rouge, who erased all vestiges of modern life in their drive for an agrarian utopia.
Regime leader Pol Pot died in a remote jungle camp in 1998, while observers worry that other former regime leaders - including Pol Pot's number two Nuon Chea, foreign minister Ieng Sary and former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan - could die before the joint UN-Cambodian tribunal is convened.
So far only two former regime leaders are in jail awaiting trial: Ta Mok, a brutal military commander who ordered some of the regime's worst purges, and Duch, the slightly-built former math teacher who during the Khmer Rouge years ran the notorious Tuol Sleng torture centre.
Inside Tuol Sleng, a former school where 17,000 men, women and children were tortured before being taken to Choeung Ek and battered to death with farm implements, the villagers shuffled through corridors that still bear traces of the horrors that occurred there.
Tangles of rusting barbed wire bar the windows and many classrooms are lined with narrow, crudely built brick cells.
Only 14 Tuol Sleng inmates - a painter, a sculptor, an engineer and a handful of others the Khmer Rouge found useful - survived their incarceration.
One of these, 75-year-old Chhum Mey, pointed out the wire whips, clubs and knives used to torture prisoners, and explained how he was kept shackled with iron bars for most of his imprisonment.
"This reminds me of the bitterness I encountered under the regime," he said before breaking down into sobs.
Composing himself, he vowed to come before the tribunal to condemn his former tormentors.
"I will be one of the witnesses. I just want to ask them what led me to be put in Tuol Sleng," he said.
Cambodians appear divided over a Khmer Rouge tribunal, with some wondering what good it will do to put old men on the dock so many years after the genocide.
"I don't feel happy about seeing this because as a victim I don't know what justice can be had," said 40 year-old Nob Mei as he peered into the tribunal's future courtroom.
But Phon Sam An, whose husband and nine other family members were killed by the Khmer Rouge, said closure is needed for those who perished never knowing what alleged crimes had sent them to their deaths.
"This trial will help find justice for those victims who had done nothing wrong," she said.
"If there is no tribunal, they died in vain, like animals." - AFP/de
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